"Get ready before hard times hit; being tough makes tough times easier."
Gustavo Couto Tweet
Gustavo Couto is a distinguished finance professional renowned for his leadership and comprehensive expertise in the financial sector. With a multifaceted educational background and over 10 years of hands-on experience, he has established himself as a visionary leader in finance.
Since November 2013, Gustavo Couto has served as the Executive Vice President at Five Rings Financial, LLC, based in Boca Raton, FL. In this pivotal role, he has made a transformative impact by personally assisting over 1000 clients in creating their own living benefits and safe accumulation and lifetime income retirement strategies plans.
Furthermore, Gustavo’s visionary leadership has led to the inception and growth of a large agency, starting from zero and expanding it to over 450 active agents. This dynamic team has collectively assisted over 20,000 clients in the last year, generating an impressive production value exceeding $30,000,000 since inception.
A master communicator, Gustavo excels in simplifying intricate financial concepts into easily comprehensible and engaging workshops. Through his adept presentation skills, he empowers clients and audiences by imparting knowledge, enabling them to make informed decisions about their financial futures.
His unwavering commitment to financial security and resilience, coupled with his educational foundation, and exceptional results in client management and agency growth, has solidified Gustavo Couto’s reputation as a trusted authority and impactful leader in the finance industry.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Gustavo Couto: My name is Gustavo Couto, I’m originally from Brazil but have been living in the United States for more than 20 years. I’m an American citizen and I like to tell people I am Brazilian by birth and American by love! I absolutely love this country and the opportunities everyone now has to be successful.
About 10 years ago, I joined Five Rings Financial, a financial services company that focuses on educating middle Americans about their finances. Our focus on education is what sets us apart from all of the other financial firms, like the ‘Merryl Lynch’es and Charles Schwabs of the world.
I started with Five Rings looking for a career change. I had no prior experience working as a financial services consultant and over the last decade I am proud to have made a transformative impact by personally assisting over 1000 clients in creating their own living benefits, safe accumulation and lifetime income retirement strategies plans.
Not to mention that I was also able to lead the inception and growth of a large agency, the “Brazillionaires”, we started from zero and expanded to over 450 active agents (to date).
Our dynamic team has collectively assisted over 20,000 clients in the last year alone and we have generated an impressive value exceeding $30,000,000 in target premiums since inception.
Can you share a time when your business faced a significant challenge? How did you navigate through it?
Gustavo Couto: Absolutely! We and pretty much the entire planet had a significant challenge during the COVID crisis in 2020. This was even more alarming to us because our client acquisition process was based on holding educational workshops about money.
I am sure you remember that during the pandemic no one was allowed to attend workshops or group events, so how could we continue to move forward without this critical component of our business model?
The key to navigating this issue was being able to anticipate the problem. While the pandemic was still only active in China, this was early in the year, we noticed that it was fast spreading and before it even started in the United states our team became very focused on looking for technology alternatives for the financial educational workshops. We decided to implement an online backbone and have it ready just in case we needed it.
Sure enough by March 2020 the entire country was shutting down. It just so happened that the very last in-person training meeting that we were allowed to have in our office was the weekend before the shutdown in the state of Florida, where we are headquartered.
During that meeting we launched our online platform and trained our team on how to leverage the online workshops to continue our financial education process from home!
How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?
Gustavo Couto: Failure was not an option! The possibility of not helping our clients could be catastrophic not just for us but for those families as well. People in general were forced to face the reality that we are all mortals and the risk of life during the pandemic was very clear for everyone.
This caused an increased demand for life insurance, so we needed to continue to service these families. That being said, many other agencies were reluctant to have online workshops and online meetings, so they proceeded to have phone-based conversations with their clients; some were still requiring in-person meetings, even though this was a risk to everyone involved.
We held daily meetings with our team over zoom. We held training sessions on how to become an effective financial services consultant by using the video conferencing technology. We helped people make that transition as fast as they could, so they could continue to provide for their families as well as take care of their clients.
By fast adopting technology and continuously training and enabling our team, we set ourselves up to grow that year. While most agencies had flat or negative returns, our agency had a 50% growth during the pandemic year.
Three years later we are still collecting the benefits from such a transition. Today 99% of our agents work from home, they enjoy a much better quality of life while they can serve clients all over the United States with the same quality and efficiency that we had prior to the pandemic when people were still meeting in person.
How do you build a resilient team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?
Gustavo Couto: The most important quality we look for in our team members is the desire to grow!
That hunger to succeed is the primary factor that will determine if a person can face the challenges that come towards them and still come out successful on the other end.
How do you maintain your personal resilience during tough times?
Gustavo Couto: Personally, I avoid all external information sources that cause me stress; let me explain: I do not watch the news constantly nor browse for negative news on the Internet.
I avoid conversations that bring people down with negative subjects. This is extremely important when you are facing a challenge or when your community is going through tough times.
Thinking positively is hard work but it’s possible! Of course, nobody is perfect and once in a while I will find myself looking for reasons to worry or stress or create anxiety for myself.
The important thing is that I learned to recognize these actions and I can interrupt the tough patterns and start to direct myself to think about all of the potential positive outcomes and my desired reality. I subscribe to a sentence I learned from Bob Proctor: You create your own reality, I create my own reality.
What strategies do you use to manage stress and maintain focus during a crisis?
Gustavo Couto: Constant communication and feedback loops were established to help team members in our agency focus on our desired outcome instead of the challenges or crisis at hand.
This is how we were able to manage the stress and maintain our focus during the pandemic crisis of 2020.
How do you communicate with your team during a crisis?
Gustavo Couto: I find that person to person is the best way, sometimes it’s not possible and with our agency it is not possible because most of our agents are spread all around the United States. If in-person communication is not possible, then the very best alternative is video conferencing.
That being said you can do a great job by video conferencing as long as you create some important guidelines.
For instance, in our team meetings everybody in the call must have their cameras on and must be focused on the meeting. It is amazing how we can read body language and work with each other’s energy and emotions by video call if we can all see each other.
What advice would you give to other CEOs on building resilience in their organizations?
Gustavo Couto: Don’t wait for a crisis in order to build resilience. Build resilience instead and the crisis will be handled almost automatically.
The way we do that is to have constant communication with our teams as well as by creating periodic challenges and competitions. We like to create challenges at least once every 6 months and let the team compete to succeed.
Competition and recognition is important, but it’s also important to make sure people understand that we can all have a good competitive spirit without having to bring anybody down so that we can win; that is what I call a productive competition.
How do you prepare your business for potential future crises?
Gustavo Couto: We hold a monthly video conference with our leaders. These calls are set up to talk about the state of affairs, celebrate achievements and at the same time bring up any potential challenges that we see on the radar.
We have a very open dialogue and as a leader I am not afraid to say when I don’t know the answer to something. I am happy to ask the team for feedback and input. It is amazing what we can accomplish when everybody is focused and wants to succeed as a group and individually at the same time.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership in times of crisis?
Gustavo Couto: As a leader we don’t have all the answers, we don’t even know for sure we are going to succeed during the crisis. But what we know for sure is that we have to be the ones focused on the desired outcome to begin with, we must give no space for our fears, we may have them, but we cannot share them with our teams.
There were definitely moments of fear during the pandemic crisis, I had to take the time to handle them internally first, I did not share them with the team as this would foster a widespread fear. My job was to be the leader and inspire folks with courage and determination.
If I was not ready for that, then I would not be in front of the group, so I had to take time for myself and invest heavily on personal development during that time.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Gustavo Couto for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Gustavo Couto or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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